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Retro music is all fun and games

Kate Kingsmill

When Malcolm McLaren discovered chiptune music in its burgeoning stages in 2003, he declared it "revolutionary", "the final repository of the marvellous" and its makers "the last possessors of the wand of Cinderella's fairy godmother". McLaren was known for hyperbole though, so what's chiptune music really about?

Essentially, chiptune - or retrotech, or 8-bit - is music made from old gaming consoles. Arcade game sounds have been used to make music since the late '70s (Yellow Magic Orchestra's Computer Game for example) and since consoles such as Game Boys, Commodore 64s and Sega Megadrives were created they, too, have been plundered by music heads.

The name of the genre comes from the console's sound chip. Anyone who has heard the sounds made by these gadgets will know that there are massive limitations to the aural palette of sounds and voices (sounds played together) that are possible, so a fair bit of work goes into making a decent tune. You can hack an old gaming machine, solder one of the old audio chips onto a synthesiser or, more perversely, now you can emulate the sound chips in contemporary software.

The past 10 years in particular have seen a proliferation of childhood gaming consoles being repurposed to make old sounds new again. It was the release of the tracker program, Little Sound Dj (LSDj) in 2000, ten years after the original Game Boy console, that sent chiptune music supersonic. Created by engineer and chiptune artist Role Model aka Johan Kotlinski, the impact of the LSDj is comparable to the invention of the sampler in hip hop, and has been instrumental in pushing the scene forward. Essentially, the Little Sound Dj transforms a Game Boy into a fully fledged music station with a sequencer, four channels of 4-bit sound, samples and synchronisation capabilities.

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That technology, combined with the communicative power of the internet, has seen the chip music phenomenon grow to a global but pretty insular scene. The most notable chiptune label is the New York based 8bitpeoples, which was responsible for the first chip music festival, Blip Festival in 2006 in New York City. The festival spread to Scandinavia then Japan and even came to Melbourne in February last year, and featured internationals such as Nullsleep, Bit Shifter, Patric Catani and local maestros such as Dot.A.Y. Since then, Square Sounds, SoundBytes and the Pocket Music events, all showcasing chiptune, have cropped up. Most recently, Square Sounds was held this month in spots around Melbourne including the Evelyn Hotel, Fitzroy and featured local artists including Pselodux, Chronic Sans and Trash80.

While chiptune has its own freedoms - it's portable, strictly analogue, and no studio or recording devices are required - it still has massive limitations. Creativity often thrives on limitations though, and chiptune has evolved to almost match contemporary production values and is becoming popular culture. Some iPhone games now feature old Sega-created chiptune music. Beck used chiptune sounds in his 2005 track Girl, and Deadmau5 is known for playing around with 8-bit sounds. At a grassroots level though, in an era where anyone with a computer can become a producer from their bedrooms, there's something enchanting about computer-game-based music. In a world where everything has become uber-slick, autotuned and hi-fi, chiptune, with its distinctive sounds and often charmingly wonky bpms, is an 8-bit, lo-fi ''up yours'' to 24-plus bit Pro Tools and the culture of overproduction.